Summers of Love
Lately this past year I’ve been going to a lot of funeral services. Too many and I guess a sign of my age. So it’s a bit of a relief to be down here in San Francisco to officiate a wedding for some young friends even if it is half a century past the Summer of Love and I’m not wearing flowers in my receding hair. The kids are here and they seem happy and optimistic facing what, to this old timer, seems a bleaker future than the one we faced back when.
Course, we had Viet Nam going great guns and the assassinations of King and Kennedy, Watergate, civil rights riots, so maybe they got reason for optimism. My old man once told us boys he thought he’d lived in the best of times. And he’d fought in World War 2 on a PT boat in the Pacific and the Mediterranean. Like Dickens said, these were the best of times, these were the worst of times. I guess they’re OUR times and the future isn’t.
At a dinner the other night I was describing to a Vietnamese woman our place up on an island in the Pacific Northwest. She grew more and more animated until finally she clapped her hands and cried, “You live in a dream!” I said , what? And she said, “I want live where you do!”
We take our lives for granted, I know, even though the mizzus and me try to remind ourselves how truly fortunate we are, how the paths we took might have turned out so much worse, how happiness itself can become banal and taken for granted. We do live in a dream, all of us, and the trick is to walk the fine line between the waking and the dreaming, not falling asleep. Today we’re going to marry the kids. They’re dreaming of love, of each other, of a perfect future together. They’ll have flowers in their hair and stars in their eyes and once again it will be the Summer of Love.
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Tags: Signs of the Times, Summer of Love Redux